It's a problem as old as networked computing. Consider two applications. They negotiate a level of trust. How can that trust - or security context - be transferred to a third application, one that may exist in an entirely different security domain from the first?

This problem has been solved before, but is limited by proprietary solutions that resist integration. The challenge now, which is a significant one, is to solve it again, but this time for Web services - a task complicated by the need to accommodate a broad range of established security procedures and legacy technologies.

Context in ContextSecurity context is an ambiguous term. Take, for example, the SSL protocol. Here, security context is largely cryptographic metadata - the master key, derived session keys, ciphers and hashes, etc. - which are associated by a public SSL session ID. The session ID exists precisely to allow reuse of these across independent connections and thus avoid the expensive public key-based handshakes that would be necessary to re-establish them. Authentication might not even be involved; such is the case with the Diffie-Hellman cipher suite.

In this article, we will explore the more fundamental problem of transferring the security context established by an act of authentication - that is, a sufficiently substantiated claim of principle identity - between applications in a Web services environment. In doing so, we will use two important OASIS Web services standards, WS-Security (WSS) and the Security Assertions Markup Language (SAML).

WSS and the Security Token MechanismBack when I was still in high school, my parents gathered up the family and spent a summer traveling in China. During a few days in Beijing, I had a chop, or signature seal, carved with my name rendered phonetically in Chinese. In China, chops have been used as a means of signature and identity since the period of the Warring States, nearly 2500 years ago.

The chop implements a security model called proof of possession. It is something physical you have, something you need to protect, and something you can use to create a security token that binds another object - a contract, a painting, etc. - to yourself. The binding consists of a stamp, most commonly rendered in red ink, of the name carved into the chop. The artistry of the carving establishes uniqueness and is a simple guard against forgery.

Shortly after we returned home, thieves broke into our house. Along with the usual targets for theft - items like TVs and stereos - they took, oddly enough, my chop. I've always thought that this was a strange thing to steal: were they drawn to it because it was shiny and elegant; or was it an early example of identity theft? Perhaps there are checking accounts open in my name somewhere in Fujian.

The real problem with my chop is that it really wasn't bound to my identity. It was fine for creating security tokens while I possessed it, but once lost, the thieves could create unlimited identity tokens with no real means for me to stop them.

Security tokens, of course, come in many different forms and with varied purposes. A token could transport credentials; it might describe an authorization decision; it may encapsulate a key for a cryptography session. This diversity is one of the challenges faced by the technical committee developing WS Security. To this end, their specification does not attempt to mandate one form of security token over another; instead, it defines a simple encapsulation mechanism that should be able to accommodate most existing methods and technologies. Thus, in WSS, applications can make claims to identity, supported by tokens. The details of how to support a particular token mechanism is defined outside the main specification, in a separate document called a token profile.

Security tokens appear as elements subordinate to the <Security> header, the block in a SOAP message under which all WS-Security related parameters appear. Most of the currently existing profiles are concerned with establishing a security context around identity. Consider, for example, username and password, probably the most familiar of all security token schemes. WSS defines a profile called - not surprisingly - the Web Services Security Username Token Profile. It defines a very simple and logical organization for usernames, passwords, and nonces; the latter enabling digest authentication schemes to provide credential validation without direct password transmission. WSS calls this type of token a proof-of-possession claim. Listing 1, taken directly from the specification, is an example. (the code is online at www.sys-con.com/websphere/sourcec.cfm)

But what about transferring an existing context? You could argue against the need for this - after all, if you have a means of authentication, why not simply re-authenticate continuously with every independent transaction? HTTP basic authentication works in this way. When a browser successfully meets an authentication challenge, it will proactively insert credentials into the HTTP Authorize header for every subsequent request in the same realm.

For some Web services applications, this is sufficient. For others, it can be tremendously expensive - the overhead of continuous credential validation can bring a directory to it knees. Furthermore, it may be unrealistic to believe that every server is capable of performing this operation. Often, this is because of access restrictions placed on central directories, perhaps due to topology, but often due to politics.

Transferring a previously established identity context, then, is a valuable thing. But it's also difficult to carry out securely. WSS provides a means to do this within its abstract token profile mechanism. Under this use case, the tokens don't establish initial identity, but describe an existing security context. These tokens have to be authoritative, so that if a token is stolen - like my chop - it can't be used to hijack or destroy an existing application or cryptography session. This challenge is addressed by the WSS SAML profile.

SAML and Context TransferSAML is designed to pass security information between systems. The basis of SAML is a markup language for declaring assertions. Assertions are declarations of facts about a subject. You can think of a subject as the binding of an entity, such as a person or a computer, to an identity in a security domain. Assertions are generated by an issuing authority, which may front an existing identity server such as an LDAP directory. In SAML, there are three distinct kinds of assertions:

Authentication assertions: These statements describe acts of authentication that have already taken place. An authentication assertion does not describe another method to perform authentication, such as using an X509 certificate; it simply affirms that a subject S was authenticated by means M at time T. In listing 2, the authentication assertion declares that subject smorrison authenticated against the Layer 7 Technologies corporate directory using a password.

Authorization assertions: An SAML issuing authority can make an authorization decision to allow or deny access for a subject to a particular resource.

Attribute assertions: These assert that a subject is associated with a collection of attributes, represented as simple name/value pairs. For example, an SAML authority might declare that subject Scott is associated with group=developers and company=Layer 7 Technologies.

By providing a generalized attribute mechanism, SAML makes an important point: that security context is more than just authentication and authorization, but also includes associated metadata that might be important in a security decision, such as a subject holding gold status in a frequent flyer system.

In addition to assertions, SAML defines a request/response protocol for obtaining assertions from SAML authorities, bindings to protocols such as SOAP for transporting assertions and queries, and profiles, which take a more holistic approach to integrating SAML within an existing framework, such as SOAP messaging or conventional, HTML-oriented HTTP.

While the vision behind SAML has been to produce a general-purpose language for communicating security context between distributed systems, its initial focus, growing out of a widespread and immediate need, has been on browser-based communications - in particular, single sign on (SSO) for the Web. SAML defines two additional profiles to address this, and in these, we can find a model for how SAML will ultimately support Web services (see Figures 1 and 2).

Both scenarios are functionally similar. The user, authenticated on system A, clicks on a URL addressing content that resides on system B. The user should not have to re-authenticate on system B (thus establishing a separate, independent security context), but instead should transfer the existing context completely to B. To complicate matters further, B may reside in a different security domain from A, so B literally may not be able to validate the subject's credentials even if they are made available. Therefore, a trust relationship must be established between A and B, so that B relies on A's word that a subject has been necessarily and sufficiently identified. Virtually every large organization attempting to integrate their internal Web servers has encountered this problem.

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The difference between these profiles appears in implementation. Figure 1 depicts a pull scenario, in which a security token, called an SAML artifact, is passed to system B as a query parameter affixed to the URL. System B uses the artifact as a handle to take complete ownership of the security context from A; this is illustrated in the figure as a SOAP call from B to A, requesting control of the context and taking delivery as a collection of SAML assertions. SAML ensures that the server-side half of the context can only exist in a single place at any given instant.

In contrast is the push scenario, which transports the context entirely within a message - in this instance, the assertions reside as a hidden field that's POSTed in a form. This eliminates the need for system B to retrieve the context from A, but requires that the assertions be signed to prevent tampering. This is actually closer to a typical Web services scenario, where context is a security token rendered into a SOAP message, but more on that later.

In practice, this process usually involves a centralized issuing authority and clever use of HTTP redirects. But what is noteworthy here is the security model. These browser profiles rely on SSL and HTTP authentication mechanisms as a means to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and trust of assertions (or artifacts). It uses existing Web security to ensure that assertions are relayed only through the subject they describe. This eliminates the threat of replay attacks and session hijacking. It's a crucial point: an assertion, even signed by an issuing authority, needs to be bound to the subject presenting it. Otherwise, what's to stop an intruder from simply copying a signed authentication assertion and using this to stake claim to that assertion's correlated security context? Unbound from identity, an assertion is like my stolen chop.

In the browser profiles, secure, authenticated channels are necessary to ensure that security tokens only pass between trusted entities. In Web services, where security is implemented on a message-by-message basis and no secure channel exists, there needs to be a different approach.

WSS SAML ProfileSAML, of course, fits cleanly into the WSS Security token structure. The real challenge, though, is more subtle than syntactic contracts. WSS is about providing security on a message-by-message basis. Furthermore, it is concerned with absorbing security into the message itself and decoupling it from channel strategies like SSL to be able to provide continuity in encryption, integrity, authentication, and reliability across a diverse set of transports and intermediates - from SMTP to MOM to plain text files, in as many hops as the application demands.

The challenge, therefore, is binding a subject's identity to an assertion so that it is verifiable by the ultimate receiver of a SOAP message. SAML addresses this with an assertion element we have not encountered yet, <SubjectConfirmation>.

An SAML issuing authority uses SubjectConfirmation to bind a particular subject's identity to an assertion. There are various strategies for this, such as including Kerberos service tickets, and these are left for specification in the relevant profile. The WSS SAML Token Profile adopts an interesting approach. Within this element, the issuing authority can insert the subject's public key. Remember, the issuing authority is making a definitive statement about an act of authentication that has already taken place, so it's likely to hold the subject's public key. If the subject authenticated using its certificate under the WSS x509 Token Profile, the key is there. Alternatively, it should be able to retrieve the key from a trusted certificate server after firmly establishing the subject's identity under a different authentication scheme, such as username/password. The key resides within the SubjectConfirmation element, inside a standard <ds:KeyInfo> block, a rich structure already described in the W3C XML Digital Signature specification.

The issuing authority then signs the entire assertion, thus authoritatively binding assertion and key. In this way, it's not unlike a certificate, which uses the signature of a trusted party to bind a public key to an identity (represented as a DN). Consider also, what often makes a certificate useful is the additional information residing within it. An SSL certificate binds a DNS name to the CN, thus allowing clients to verify that the TCP socket they've opened is indeed connected to the Internet entity described in the certificate. E-mail addresses were added to support similar trust validation, and v3.0 extension fields in the x509 specification promote still richer models of trust.

Listing 3 shows an authentication assertion, generated and signed by an SAML issuing authority. This signature binds the subject of the assertion to its DSA public key. It also includes its X509 certificate against which a receiver can compare a pre-existing trust relationship.

So why is this useful? Precisely because now the subject can create an undeniable association between any SOAP message it authors and this assertion. Our problem up until now has been that, even though it is signed by the issuing authority, a plain assertion could be intercepted and used by anyone. In this way, it's like the thieves who stole my chop, and could forge unlimited new messages claiming to come from me. Suppose we are a SOAP receiver - say some arbitrary service downstream - and we take delivery of a SOAP message containing an assertion claiming that Scott was authenticated at noon on Tuesday. How can we be confident that the sender of the SOAP message really is subject Scott, described in the assertion? SubjectConfirmation is the key - or perhaps better, holds the key. WS-Security calls this an endorsed claim, as it's been sanctioned by a trusted third party.

Figure 3 is a block diagram of a SOAP message that shows how it all comes together. It maps a typical message that a Web services consumer would compose while participating in an SSO scenario. Fundamentally, this is the same as the browser SSO model illustrated in Figure 2, with SOAP service invocations substituted for HTTP/HTML. In this use case, System A might be a centralized authentication service that consumes username and password credentials (under the WSS token profile described previously), and returns a signed SAML SSO assertion (an aggregate of an authentication assertion, time of validity, and other optional attribute fields). Bound in this assertion is the public key of the authenticated subject.

To compose the message in Figure 3, the consumer copies the signed assertion into the SOAP message unchanged. To prove rightful ownership of this assertion, the subject signs the message body. Remember, only the actual can do this, as only the subject possesses the private key paired with the public key in the assertion. This establishes an irrefutable connection between the author of the SOAP message and the assertion describing an authentication event.

It is the receiver's responsibility to process this message appropriately and take action on it based on its predetermined trust relationship with the SAML issuing authority. Under SAML, the ultimate receiver of the message is called the relying party - a logical piece of nomenclature, as the receiver relies on the trust it has with an issuing authority.

Listing 4 shows what the SOAP message looks like, as it might be delivered to the receiver. It's becoming complex, because we now have signatures from two different parties: the SAML issuing authority (over the assertion only); and the SOAP sender (over the message body). The sender, could, of course, extend its signature across the entire envelope if that is the level of integrity that the application required. In the subject's signature block, the SecurityTokenReference element contains a reference back to the assertion, where we can retrieve the public key for signature validation. Ultimately, what we have created in a chain to a trust root, not unlike a certificate chain. It might help to refer back to the block diagram in Figure 3 to help navigate through this complexity.

There's one important detail we have yet to cover. Find the <SubjectConfirmation> element in the authentication assertion in Listing 4. It has a subordinate element called <ConfirmationMethod>. In the example, ConfirmationMethod takes the value of the SAML-defined identifier urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:cm:holder-of-key. This informs a receiver that, when processing any SOAP message containing this assertion, the attesting entity must prove their association with the assertion using a signature.

An alternative processing model is called sender-vouches, indicated by the constant urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:cm:sender-vouches. This addresses an issue found in another common Web services scenario. In sender-vouches, the attesting entity is not the subject described in the SAML assertion. However, it is acting on behalf of that subject. The receiver, therefore, must trust that this is indeed the case, that the sender has validated the true subject in some way and is working on its behalf. To make this work, the attesting entity must protect both the relevant parts of the SOAP message and the assertion itself to prove that it has made that association (after all, with nothing to conjoin these data, the aggregation could have come from anyone).

Figure 4 depicts a typical scenario where this might take place. It's very similar to the classic three tier browser-based application - just substitute SOAP for HTTP/HTML, RMI or IIOP, and JDBC. System A is a Web services client. System B consumes and validates its credentials against an issuing authority. System C trusts that B validated A accurately, and processes messages from B with confidence that they are a consequence of an initial request of A.

ConclusionInside the WSS SAML token profile, we find the basic mechanism necessary to transfer one type of security context between applications using Web services. But don't lose sight of its limitations in scope and maturity. SAML - and by extension, WSS - does not deal with larger issues like cryptography or application sessions, global sign-out, or account linking. Some of these are more appropriately addressed in federation specifications like WS-Federation and Liberty. Some are addressed in other emerging standards efforts like WS-Secure Conversation and WS-Trust. Others will see light in SAML v2.0. Nevertheless, there is some very valuable work here by people who deeply understand the issues in distributed computing security, and elements of the specifications are relevant today. Which is good, because we've needed this for a long time.

K. Scott Morrison is the Chief Technology Officer and Chief Architect at Layer 7 Technologies, where he is leading a team developing the next generation of security infrastructure for cloud computing and SOA. An architect and developer of highly scalable, enterprise systems for over 20 years, Scott has extensive experience across industry sectors as diverse as health, travel and transportation, and financial services. He has been a Director of Architecture and Technology at Infowave Software, a leading maker of wireless security and acceleration software for mobile devices, and was a senior architect at IBM. Before shifting to the private sector, Scott was with the world-renowned medical research program of the University of British Columbia, studying neurodegenerative disorders using medical imaging technology.

Scott is a dynamic, entertaining and highly sought-after speaker. His quotes appear regularly in the media, from the New York Times, to the Huffington Post and the Register. Scott has published over 50 book chapters, magazine articles, and papers in medical, physics, and engineering journals. His work has been acknowledged in the New England Journal of Medicine, and he has published in journals as diverse as the IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science, the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow, and Neurology. He is the co-author of the graduate text Cloud Computing, Principles, Systems and Applications published by Springer, and is on the editorial board of Springer’s new Journal of Cloud Computing Advances, Systems and Applications (JoCCASA). He co-authored both Java Web Services Unleashed and Professional JMS. Scott is an editor of the WS-I Basic Security Profile (BSP), and is co-author of the original WS-Federation specification. He is a recent co-author of the Cloud Security Alliance’s Security Guidance for Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing, and an author of that organization’s Top Threats to Cloud Computing research. Scott was recently a featured speaker for the Privacy Commission of Canada’s public consultation into the privacy implications of cloud computing. He has even lent his expertise to the film and television industry, consulting on a number of features including the X-Files. Scott’s current interests are in cloud computing, Web services security, enterprise architecture and secure mobile computing—and of course, his wife and two great kids.

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